Archives for August 2017

Knowing what information you want to discover on a sales call is a good idea. Preparing a list of specific questions to ask on the call is a bad idea. Those two statements sound similar but they are vastly different. If you go in with a list of questions to ask, you run the risk of having the meeting feel like an interrogation to the prospect rather than a discussion. You will be inwardly focused trying to remember the questions and the order you want to ask them (and maybe even the wording) rather than focusing on what the prospect is saying. You then will miss subtle ques the prospect may give you about what concerns them. the questions you prepared may not fit the conversation exactly and may appear to be out of context to the prospect. The flow of the conversation will be interrupted. If any or all of this happens you will appear to be very “salesy” or worse out of touch.
It is a better idea to go into the call knowing what you need to find out and lead the conversation to a discussion of those topics. The exact questions you ask will be context based. That is, they will flow naturally from what the prospect has said just prior to the question you want to ask. Depend on your ability to formulate the question in a way that fits the conversation.

Most of us think logically (some more than others). But the fact is that people buy emotionally not logically. Logically I should drive an economical car to commute to work. But if I worry about status and “feel” more successful in a Mercedes, I would abandon logic and spend more money each day to get to work. When your prospect seemingly makes an illogical decision to go with a competitor, it may be because you ignored some pain indicators the prospect gave and focused more on the logic of why your product or service was better. If a prospect for a car is more concerned about how he feels in the car he drives and believes what others think of him will be affected by what he drives, then the only logical thing for the salesperson to do is to sell the client a Mercedes even if objectively “logic” would dictate the prospect should buy something more economical.

Value propositions are not for salespeople to use on sales calls. The purpose of a value proposition is to define for employees and investors what value we plan to bring to the market or what value we believe the product or service has. This is great for planning and for the training of salespeople. But that thinking is inwardly focused. As the saying goes, beauty is in the eye of the beholder and the same is true for value. A product only has value to the extent that it alleviates a pain that the prospect has. So, to announce to a prospect that “the value we bring is to do ____” is to run the risk of the prospect saying (either aloud or to himself) “but I don’t care!” He would only care if he had the problem that the product fixes and also had a passion to rid himself of the problem. It is a much better strategy to use the value proposition as a basis from which to ask questions rather than a basis to make statements about what you bring to the table.

When you can’t get to the person who makes the decision, your fate is in the hands of the untrained non-commissioned “salesperson” who carries your message to the “boss” who holds your fate in his or her hands. Does your contact know how to make an effective presentation of the reasons they want or need your product? Can they handle the objections the boss will throw at them? I never like to have my fate in someone else’s hand. A way to deal with this is to ask your prospect how they will make the case to the boss. If you like what you hear you can then ask them something like “when She asks why you went with our product even though we were more expensive what will you say”? One of three things will happen when you do this. They might have cogent reasons they can articulate to the boss which will be effective. Or they might not know what to say and you can coach them on how to make the case for your product. The third possibility is that they might get so uncomfortable with the idea of presenting your product on their own that they ask if you can accompany them to explain it to the boss. Any one of the three is preferable to letting them fail on their own and leave you with no sale.